Let’s start out with the obvious: Russell T. Davies ressurrected Doctor Who. In the process, he also completely re-created the concept of “family television”, meaning television the entire family actually watches together, as opposed to something the kids watch while the parents ignore them. He did two things that everyone, himself included, were fairly sure were impossible, and in a way that appears to be sustainable without him
Given how savage I’ve been about RTD’s writing in some of my recent reviews, you might find this praise surprising, but it’s nothing but the documentable truth. Doctor Who had collapsed in the late 80s, and languished as a television property for nearly 15 years. Lots of people wanted to see it revived, but nobody was quite sure how to do successfully accomplish it.
Until RTD found a way.
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I would love to be able to tell you that “The End of Time, Part 2″ redeemed the flaws of Part 1, not only pulling all the right rabbits out of the right hats but giving us a perfect send-off for an extremely popular and successful Doctor. Sadly, I can’t. On the other hand, I don’t have to say it was a steaming pile, either, because it wasn’t.
It was, in the end, the same sort of mixed bag Part 1 was. It was a little more solid, which continues RTD’s pattern of having shaky setups followed by better (but not always spectacular) pay-offs. But really, it was more of the same, for good and for ill, and overall, I think I’m disappointed.
RTD did succeed in handling two key parts in ways that completely surprised me. I’m still trying to decide if I like the surprises, but I like the fact that I was surprised.
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The good news is that “The End of Time, Part 1″ is noticeably better than the first half of the Series 4 finale, “The Stolen Earth”. Of course, the problem is that “The Stolen Earth” was a steaming pile of cat feces, so improving on that standard is simply not very difficult.
The bad news is that, as fun as “The End of Time, Part 1″, it isn’t as good as it ought to be. Russel T. Davies has proven time and again (most recently, I’m told, with Torchwood: “Children of Earth”, which everybody seems to rave about), that he actually knows how to write in a non-clunky, non-fanwanky way. And yet, when it comes to Doctor Who finales, he continues to fall back on clunky, contrived, fanwanky writing.
That said, RTD does make good on something he was quoted as saying about this story. In an interview, RTD had said that this story was going to be “huge and epic, but also intimate.” When I first read that, I twitched, because it sounded like a salesman trying to convince us that his product is all things to all people, which never works out.
So I was pleased to discover that he actually succeeded at crafting a story that manages to be both things at the same time.
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